I'll have to wait for the transcript to go over this in more detail, but Mitch Daniels' appearance today on ABC's This Week really cements his reputation as administration point-man for double-talk, deception and hyperbole. Trying to save the Medicare Trust Fund is "orwellian." (A quote he apparently agrees with.) The tax cut is the best way to preserve the surplus. Where'd they get this guy? More later.

As some of you may know, Andrew Sullivan has called me to task for not naming the ABC News reporter at the center of the article I published last Friday in Salon.com.

If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, I'll briefly explain. If you already know the story, skip ahead by clicking here.

In the July 13th article I described how ABC News received a timeline from Gary Condit's office detailing the congressman's activities on the days surrounding Chandra Levy's disappearance. Producers at ABC knew that key facts in the timeline were wrong because parts of the timeline had to do with one of ABC's own reporters. The timeline said Condit had met with the reporter on the day of Levy's disappearance (May 1st) when in fact he had not. ABC confronted Condit's legal team only to be told that the timeline was just a work-in-progress, a rough draft, and so forth. They eventually decided to give Condit's office the benefit of the doubt - assuming that this was just an honest mistake, rather than a deliberate attempt to create a false alibi for the congressman. Further complicating the situation for ABC was the fact that the reporter has been alleged to have had a romantic relationship with Condit. (This run-down obviously omits a lot of key details. So if you want the whole story do read the whole article.)

So the question is why didn't we name the reporter? Andrew says that the media has one privacy rule for its own and another for everyone else. It's a pretty good point - and one that I was thinking myself before I even started reporting the story. Frankly, I think it's true. And this case is a pretty good example of that fact. I don't have much doubt that - given even her minor role in the case - you'd know this woman's name if she weren't a reporter for ABC News. ABC has a story to report; but it's implicated in the story on a number of levels. So they've essentially put the reporter on ice, and squelched the story. (This was the gist of my article - and thus in a sense Andrew and I aren't that far apart.)

But where do Salon and I fit in?

I found out the name of the reporter while reporting the article. And her name was confirmed to me by a source with impeccable knowledge of the situation - just not on the record. And that's the point: no one would go on the record with this woman's name.

If this were just a question of her as a reporter that might not have been a problem. But it's central to this story that there are rampant rumors about her alleged romantic involvement with Condit. And a major metropolitan daily, The New York Post, has published the allegation.

Normally, a mere allegation counts for nothing. But in this case it's different, because true or not these allegations have affected ABC's willingness to confront the story, or at least that's what I argue.

But we didn't have any confirmation that this affair allegation was true. In fact, we had a firm denial from an ABC News executive.

So the question we faced was this: do we name this woman in the context of allegations of an affair when no one will go on the record identifying her, and we have no evidence validating that the allegations of an affair are true?

Framed that way, the question doesn't seem that hard to answer.

I wouldn't publish an article alleging that two people were having an affair unless at least one of them was willing to confirm it. And I feel pretty confident saying that since I publicly criticized the Washington Post for doing so just last Friday.

Andrew says that "If ABC News is right about their reporter's relationship with Condit, this is one instance in which there are no real privacy considerations. As long as ABC News says there was no affair, then the reporter has nothing to be afraid of in disclosing her name."

But this isn't an argument so much as a logical trap, a cleverly packaged catch-22 from which the folks at ABC could never escape. I think Andrew may be right when he says that the reporter and/or ABC News have a duty to come forward with this information (that was really the point of my article, after all) but that's obviously a bone he has to pick with ABC and the reporter, not me.

Having said all this, though, there's still a problem: there really is a lot more solicitousness for this woman's privacy than there is for many others who aren't in the media. To make a point we could have cut through all the reportorial niceties noted above and simply named her. And in a sense I suppose that would have made things more fair. But this would just be a 'two wrongs don't make a right' situation or a case of (the wingers' favorite phrase) defining deviancy down.

Now there's one other point Andrew brings up that I'd like to address. He says that spilling the beans on this reporter woman is precisely what a me-zine is for. I don't agree. I've written a lot of things in these virtual pages that I probably couldn't have gotten an editor to go along with. But I think that when I write an article for a magazine and we come to some sort of agreement about how to proceed on an editorial question that I have an obligation not to do an end-run around them and take some information that we agreed not to publish and spill the beans on Talking Points. It would depend on the situation, of course. If the magazine did something really egregious I might use my site to get out some important information. But that doesn't apply here.

So as you've probably surmised by now, I'm not going to post this woman's name. In his email to me Andrew said that if I had "the balls" I'd publish the woman's name. Frankly, if this is a test of my editorial manliness, I don't think I've got much to prove - given all I've published here. And since the whole issue here is tying a man and woman together sexually in print, I'll just stand before you in the spirit of the moment, wag my finger and say: my balls have nothing to do with that woman, the un-named off-air reporter from ABC News.

Regarding the Condit lie detector test, here's some other morsels to keep in mind.

In his post tonight Mickey Kaus notes that Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA spy, passed a number of lie detector tests. So clearly the technology is not infallible.

But this only scratches the surface of the story.

The polygraph expert retained by Condit attorney Abbe Lowell is named Barry Colvert, a former FBI lie detector expert. One of the bullet points on Colvert's resume is that he did the interrogations of Aldrich Ames. Now I don't know if the tests Ames beat were administered by Colvert. But it seems like a definite possibility. So it's not just that Ames beat a lie detector test. It may be that he beat this expert.

But there's more. A lot more.

Back in January 1998 when former Teamsters' President Ron Carey was trying to fight off an indictment and expulsion from the union over the campaign donation-swapping scandal, he decided to take a lie detector test to clear himself. He passed the test.

The test was administered by none other than Barry Colvert.

Now this is a little painful for me to say, because I always liked Ron Carey, but the bottom line is that he was eventually indicted. So Colvert's results look a little iffy in retrospect.

More striking though is the way that test was apparently administered. Read this snippet from a January 21st, 1998 AP story and see if the Carey test doesn't sound very similar to the one Abbe Lowell described Colvert administering to Gary Condit.

Barry Colvert, an agent for 35 years who interrogated Aldrich Ames and other high-profile spies, asked Carey two crucial questions about the scheme.

"I did not find any indication of deception in either of those primary questions," Colvert said. He added that, "If the readings were close and flat, I wouldn't have rendered that opinion."

Colvert's questions and the questions posed to Carey by his attorney, Reid Weingarten, were limited to charges that about $735,000 was donated by the Teamsters to generate contributions to Carey's re-election campaign.

Carey was not asked if he knew that other labor leaders, including AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka, allegedly had funneled prohibited donations to his campaign.

(Carey seems to be the only other high-profile case Colvert has handled since he went into private practice in 1997 -- I base this on a Nexis search on Colvert's name which revealed no mentions beside those tied to Carey.)

And then there's one more detail.

My understanding is that, at approximately this time, Carey had working for him a PR consultant by the name of Marina Ein. (I do not know whether she was still working for Carey at the time of the test in January 1998 -- but I know she was shortly before that.) And as you'll remember, if you're following the case, that's the same Marina Ein who is now working for Gary Condit.

What does this all mean? I'm going to let the information speak for itself. But it does make you wonder.

Regarding the Condit lie detector test, here's some other morsels to keep in mind.

In his post tonight Mickey Kaus notes that Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA spy, passed a number of lie detector tests. So clearly the technology is not infallible.

But this only scratches the surface of the story.

The polygraph expert retained by Condit attorney Abbe Lowell is named Barry Colvert, a former FBI lie detector expert. One of the bullet points on Colvert's resume is that he did the interrogations of Aldrich Ames. Now I don't know if the tests Ames beat were administered by Colvert. But it seems like a definite possibility. So it's not just that Ames beat a lie detector test. It may be that he beat this expert.

But there's more. A lot more.

Back in January 1998 when former Teamsters' President Ron Carey was trying to fight off an indictment and expulsion from the union over the campaign donation-swapping scandal, he decided to take a lie detector test to clear himself. He passed the test.

The test was administered by none other than Barry Colvert.

Now this is a little painful for me to say, because I always liked Ron Carey, but the bottom line is that he was eventually indicted. So Colvert's results look a little iffy in retrospect.

More striking though is the way that test was apparently administered. Read this snippet from a January 21st, 1998 AP story and see if the Carey test doesn't sound very similar to the one Abbe Lowell described Colvert administering to Gary Condit.

Barry Colvert, an agent for 35 years who interrogated Aldrich Ames and other high-profile spies, asked Carey two crucial questions about the scheme.

"I did not find any indication of deception in either of those primary questions," Colvert said. He added that, "If the readings were close and flat, I wouldn't have rendered that opinion."

Colvert's questions and the questions posed to Carey by his attorney, Reid Weingarten, were limited to charges that about $735,000 was donated by the Teamsters to generate contributions to Carey's re-election campaign.

Carey was not asked if he knew that other labor leaders, including AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka, allegedly had funneled prohibited donations to his campaign.

(Carey seems to be the only other high-profile case Colvert has handled since he went into private practice in 1997 -- I base this on a Nexis search on Colvert's name which revealed no mentions beside those tied to Carey.)

And then there's one more detail.

My understanding is that, at approximately this time, Carey had working for him a PR consultant by the name of Marina Ein. (I do not know whether she was still working for Carey at the time of the test in January 1998 -- but I know she was shortly before that.) And as you'll remember, if you're following the case, that's the same Marina Ein who is now working for Gary Condit.

What does this all mean? I'm going to let the information speak for itself. But it does make you wonder.

I think my attempt at subtlety in my last post left me a bit misunderstood. So let me try to clarify.

I'm still trying to sort out what I think of the in-house lie detector test that Abbe Lowell arranged for his client Gary Condit. Opinion on that point seems to have evolved pretty quickly, even over the half-dozen hours or so since Lowell's press conference.

But for the moment let's take the answers to these three questions wholly at face value and assume their veracity. If you boil down the three questions they asked of Condit they basically come down to this: a) were you involved in, or did you cause, Levy's disappearance? and b) do you know the current whereabouts of her or her remains?

Those two questions leave some pretty obvious questions unasked. Like, Do you know what happened to Chandra? Do you know who harmed her / is responsible for her disappearance?

In any case, for now, suffice it to say that even if you completely buy that this was a legit test, it leaves a pretty big and obvious question unanswered, especially because it's not too difficult to speculate about who some potential other suspects might be.

Now, on to other matters.

There seems to be some anti-Talking Points mojo in the air tonight because I'm being called on the carpet by fellow me-ziners Mickey KausandAndrew Sullivan -- for two entirely different things. Kaus says I'm going soft because I criticized the Washington Post'sstory on Condit's alleged affair with the then-18 year old woman from back home in Modesto. Sullivan is on my case or, perhaps better to say, putting me on the spot for not providing the name of the ABC News reporter discussed in this article I wrote yesterday in Salon. I'm going to come back to the matter of the unnamed reporter. But first let's deal with Kaus.

I went back and read the July 12th Washington Post article about the minister and his daughter and I think I was in part wrong to question its relevance. Now this will get kind of complicated so bear with me (it's also four o'clock in the morning so incoherence is a real possibility as well).

My initial concern was the combination of how distant this affair seemed from anything to do with the Levy case and the fact that the alleged paramour herself denied the affair took place. Hardly a small matter. The combination, I thought, made it not ready to publish.

However, what's really key is not the relationship itself but Susan Levy's alleged phone call in mid-April confronting Chandra with news of the earlier relationship, and Chandra's alleged subsequent discussion of that relationship with Condit. This chain of events seems quite relevant to what was happening in Chandra's life in the last two weeks before her disappearance -- even if you allow the possibility that the other affair didn't happen. For the purposes of understanding what was up with Chandra, what matters is that she and her mother believed it was true and that she discussed it with Condit.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I think I was at least partly incorrect on the question of relevance -- though I still have misgivings about the fact that they went with the story while the woman herself denied that the affair had even taken place. Perhaps it would have been better to front the combustible conversations between Susan and Chandra Levy, and Chandra and Condit, rather than the alleged affair itself. Though this probably wouldn't have made for such a charged headline. Make sense? I'll get to Sullivan's very legitimate point (and challenge) tomorrow.

Maybe it's just my underlying innocence and naivete, but it's hard for me not to look at this case in a rather different light now that Rep. Condit has submitted to a lie detector test, even one in a highly controlled setting, and with questions contrived with precision by his attorney.

Gary Condit's flacks have to look pretty long and hard these days to find something -- anything -- which will let them go on the offensive against the media avalanche of stories adverse to their client (like plowing the sea, as Bolivar famously said). But yesterday's Washington Post gave them a pretty good shot at it.

The Post has done what I think is a pretty admirable job reporting this story thus far -- even though they do seem to be working in pretty close concert with the Levy's PR firm. But their story about an affair Condit allegedly carried on with a then-18 year old woman is a textbook example of a story that just doesn't seem to have any relevance to this case.

We already know that Gary Condit is ... well, how shall we say it? ... a bit of a man about town? Unlike the Anne Marie Smith case, which has an arguable relevance to the Levy story, this one seems to have none. Plus, the alleged paramour herself first wouldn't confirm the relationship and then actively denied it.

The entire evidence for the affair apparently hinges on the woman's father's say-so. A lot of other news outlets apparently had a shot at this story and took a pass -- a number with reputations far beneath that of the Post.

Did Condit have this affair too? Who knows? But more to the point, who cares?

Krugman didn't mention the Talking Points site by name. But he quoted from it, or rather borrowed a quote from Mitch Daniels, which appeared here on this site, and was kind enough to give credit. Something that hasn't been done by some others who shall remain nameless.

In any case, let me try to salvage this self-promoting post with something approaching substance.

Krugman made a point which I had intended to cover in a follow-up to the original post, but he made it with far greater elegance and authority than I could have mustered. That is, while the concept of a 'lockbox' is of course a fiction, it is a very important fiction, or rather one with very real consequences and effects.

Simply put, Social Security's incoming revenues will not cover its outflows in the coming decades. There is a decent argument put forward by some liberals that the economic forecasts on which these assumptions are based are too pessimistic -- and we can largely grow our way out of the problem, if you make certain assumptions based on long-term gains in productivity and so forth. But even if this is true, it's still sensible and prudent not to base our plans on the rosiest of possible outcomes.

So you come back to the basic point that income won't cover outflow. Some of that difference will likely have to be made up by some mix of benefit cuts and perhaps tax increases -- though I'm very dubious about further raising payroll taxes on workers -- or perhaps supplementing Social Security payments with funds from general revenue, i.e. not from payroll taxes.

But the bottom line is that some more money is probably going to have to be found somewhere. By paying off debt now we reduce the amount of money the government currently pays in interest on that debt. That frees up general revenue funds which could go to propping up Social Security down the road.

But the more basic point is that reducing our burden of debt today will make it easier to do some borrowing to shore up Social Security tomorrow. Though the mechanism for all this is complicated by the intricacies of government bond issues, and one part of the government owing money to another part of the government, the essence of the matter is that some of it will likely have to be borrowed. And paying off debt today will make that potential borrowing tomorrow far more feasible.

However this may be, as Krugman notes, the sort of funny-business the Bushies are now engaged in makes it far more likely that Social Security really will go off a cliff in a few decades and that the problem will have to be solved through draconian benefit cuts.

In any case, this is the point I was going to make but Krugman beat me to it. But if Krugman wants to keep up with this Talking Points-Krugman vs. Daniels-Bush tagteam action, what can I say, I'm game.

Along other lines, for the real Talking Points die-hards, I've got three new articles which might strike your fancy. This one in the American Prospect details the story behind the Social Security privatization group Treasury Secretary O'Neill spoke to recently. This one in the New Republic Online argues that you need only look at the legislative docket in Congress to see why time is on the Democrats' side. And this one in Salon.com details an as-yet-untold story about ABC News and the 'timeline' Gary Condit's office made available at the end of June. Here's a hint: one of the meetings the original timeline described on May 1st (the day Chandra disappeared) never happened.

You might look at this blizzard of words (running the gamut from polemic, to commentary, to investigative reporting) and say to yourself: This is the sign of a fabulously prolific up-and-coming young writer with acute insights on contemporary politics! Actually, the real lesson to be drawn is a touch different. And that would be? That supporting yourself as a freelance writer is *#$%&@ hell on wheels!!!